The Balkan Jews and the Greek War of Inde

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I open this thread to shed light on yet another dark chapter of Balkan
history, which biased Christian westerners have never bothered to
uncover. 

Little is known of the faith of the Balkan Jews during the turbulent
times of the collapsing Ottoman Empire. An uniniterested Europe, never
bothered to uncover or record the the deaths of Balkan Jews and Turks
during the Greek war of independence. Sympathetic to chrisian Greeks,
Europeans chose to portray that war as a liberations.  But as a result
of that struggle for liberation, in the spring of 1820 Turkish and
Jewish communities in Greece  disapereared suddenly and finally,
without leaving any traces. For them that was no war of indepence or
liberation, but a war of total extermination.  While I knew about the
faith of the Turkish population killed during that war, I knew little
about the faith of the Jews, until I came upon this article written by
Shira Shoenberg:

By supporting the Ottoman Empire, the Jews curried 
          disfavor with the Christian Orthodox Greeks. In 1821-1829, during the 
          Greek War of Independence, thousands of Jews were massacred alongside 
          the Ottoman Turks. The Jewish communities of Mistras, Tripolis, Kalamata 
          and Patras were completely destroyed. A few survivors moved north to 
          areas still under Ottoman rule.
In the late 19^th century, Greece attempted 
          to regain the southern Balkan territories historically associated with 
          Greek history and language. Jews and other ethnic groups were subject 
          to "Hellenization," a movement to force them into accepting 
          Greek custom and language. The Romaniot Jews of southern and northwestern 
          Greece were already Hellenized to a large extent. The Hellinization 
          was mostly problematic for the Sepharadim who only came under Greek 
          rule after the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913.

To me Jews seem to be yet another ethnicity in the long list of victims of Hellenic chauvinism. 

Source:

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/Greece.html#Ottoman%20Rule

What do you know about the Jews of Greece during the Greek war of independence?

Edited by bg_turk - 25-Nov-2006 at 14:12